Hot viruses

The number of viruses on this planet is unimaginably high. If you stack all viruses present on earth on top of each other, you would create a tower that stretches 200 light years into the universe. Viruses are everywhere. They are also present on sites where boiling water from deep within the earth is reaching the surface, conditions which are thought to resemble those of the early earth.

A French sandwich is quite different from a Dutch sandwich, which causes confusion about the interpretation of the phenomenon “sandwich PhD-student”

Tessa E. F. Quax

These viruses have astonishing shapes like that of an egg or a bottle. They are very stable at extremely high temperatures. This brings the possibility of life of other planets a little bit closer. One of these viruses exploits an unique mechanism to escape from the cell. On the cell surface several large pyramidal structures with sevenfold rotation symmetry are build. Eventually they pop open so that viruses can leave the cell. The geometry of this structure is unrecorded in the living world and offer possibilities for targeted delivery of drugs.